Eager for Extraterrestrials

Kristen Stephens

Jour 271

November 6, 2012

Word Count: 788 words

In-depth UFOs

UNIVERSITY - The sky stirs with flashes of light whipping through an otherwise silent, black night. The source is too quick and strange to identify and goes into the stack of sightings classified as an unidentified flying object or UFO. Is there really a chance that another intelligent life lurks within our atmosphere?

    According to the Encyclopedia of American Studies, seven percent of the American population thinks it has seen a UFO.

    The government’s well-kept secrets

    The supernatural has terrorized the minds of the public since the late 1930s. Distraught and confused, the American public panicked during the 1938 Columbia Broadcasting System’s radio reading of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds under the direction of Orson Welles. 

    “People believed it even though the radio broadcast said every 15 minutes or so ‘this is not real,’” said JoAnne Gabrynowicz, professor and Director of the National Center for Remote Sensing, Air and Space Law. “People didn’t hear that, and they went into a mass hysteria.”

    Even after the 1930s hysteria died down, UFO sightings grew around 1947, soon after World War II and at the beginning of the Cold War. The increase in sightings can be attributed to the public's government trust issues according to Charles S. Clark’s “Pursuing the Paranormal.” 

    “The public had had two years to adjust to the existence of weapons of mass destruction when the era of UFOs dawned,” Clark said. “The term ‘flying saucer’ entered the national lexicon in 1947 - two years after atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”  

    An article by Harvey M. Kahn from El Chicano Weekly stated, in 1953, the Air Force Safety Agency tried to track a UFO flying over Lake Superior in Michigan. The F89C Scorpion Jet they dispatched was able to close in on the UFO, but shortly both aircraft went off the radar and were never heard of again except to say that the pilot of the jet must have suffered vertigo and crashed into the lake.

    Some remain skeptical about whether the government is hiding information regarding UFOs and other intelligent life from the public. Others believe that if the government is hiding something, they do so in the best interests for the public.

  “The government should act as a protector from outside enemies and domestic enemies and that’s about it,” said senior linguistics major Seth Wilson. “If it’s them protecting us as they should from outside invaders, I feel they have a right to privacy until the mission is accomplished.”

Extraterrestrials taking the tax payers’ money

    Today, hype over UFOs has somewhat died down. The topic is less frequent in public circulation and UFO sightings are few and far between, bringing barely any fuel to conspiracy theorists’ theories. Funding for space programs has been cut as some tax payers’ feel the government should concentrate on immediate threats such as war and famine, according to William Triplett’s “The Search for Extraterrestrials.”   

    However, some of the public believe the space program is dire to the country's advancement.

    “It needs to be more funded than any other federal organization,” said Wilson. “The more we know about space, the better we can protect our planet. Like I said, I think [the government] should protect us from outside enemies and sometimes nature is our worst enemy.”

Keeping up with evidence

    Preet Sharma a fourth year Ph.D. student in particle physics served as astronomy lab instructor for undergraduate students. The class peered at the night sky, often looking at far-off nebulae and galaxies, all without a single UFO sighting or disturbance. Sharma commented he was uncertain whether other intelligent life existed and under what conditions they could thrive.

   “It could be possible; it could not be possible,” Sharma said. “It [also] depends on what kind of life you’re talking about. If it is life almost like that of the earth, then conditions of the earth would be the best. If there is some other form of life, which we do not know about, it’s hard to say what the conditions are because it would depend on the type of organisms. 

    For now, due to little evidence to support the theory, whether other intelligent life and UFOs exist is left up to the individual. However, stories on the subject still taunt the media. In October, a family in Scotland claimed to see a UFO hovering around their house for hours according to The Huffington Post. A story about the mid 1900s suggested some conspiracy theorists even believed that extraterrestrials worked in our government.

    Whether the public give government power to extraterrestrials or claim to see evidence of them in the late hours of the night, one thing is certain: they will still lurk the depths of the human imagination.